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Interesting interview with Stan Salot and Todd Kramer. They talked about the Counterfeit electronic parts situation, how come 80% of all parts ordered in the US come from Asia, growing concerns about counterfeit parts in military, and how counterfeit components get into the supply chain.

The electronics industry has tried very hard at cracking down bootleg components, marking to x-raying. Now the DARPA (Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is calling upon engineers to solve the problem.

Counterfeiter components are prevalent in the defense supply chain. They exist in both expensive chips and components that cost pennies. This is an important issue in the industry as system failures caused by counterfeit parts can lead to loss of life and failure of military missions.

The new DARPA Supply Chain Hardware Integrity for Electronics Defense (SHIELD) program is hoping that engineers can develop a tool that will verify protected electronic components without disrupting or harming the system.

The resulting component would be affixed to the components being protected and would be scanned for information. It would not maintain an electrical connection with the host component. The dielets could be scanned individually or in batches. The information would be stored and shared in a centralized server, which would send a challenge to the device to confirm that no tampering has occurred.

Beginning this year, Google has been buying up some of the world's most advanced robotics and artificial intelligence companies. Boston Dynamics, which specialize in military purpose robots is one of them. Check out their robots in action in the above video. Please note that aesthetic is not of their top priority, as you maybe able to tell...

So there have been a lot of hypes around this Raspberry Pi thing for a while now, for those of you that are not in the tech business, exactly what is Raspberry Pi and what does it do?

The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card-sized single-board computer developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation with the intention of promoting the teaching of basic computer science in schools. It can be used in electronics projects, and for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games.

The Raspberry Pi is manufactured in two board configurations through licensed manufacturing deals with Newark element14 (Premier Farnell), RS Components and Egoman.

And while RS and Farnell sell the Raspberry Pi online, its distribution in China and Taiwan is done by a company called Egoman. The Egoman version can be distinguished from other Pis by their red coloring and lack of FCC/CE marks but the hardware is essentially the same across all manufacturers.

The Raspberry Pi has a Broadcom BCM2835 system on a chip (SoC), which includes an ARM1176JZF-S 700 MHz processor, VideoCore IV GPU, and was originally shipped with 256 megabytes of RAM, (it was later upgraded to 512 MB). It does not include a built-in hard disk or solid-state drive, but uses an SD card for booting and persistent storage.

The Foundation provides Debian and Arch Linux ARM distributions for download. Tools are available for Python as the main programming language, with support for BBC BASIC (via the RISC OS image or the Brandy Basic clone for Linux), C, Java and Perl.

The best way to avoid counterfeits is to purchase parts from distributors who are authorized by the manufacturer to sell their product. Authorized distributors are those that get their parts directly from the manufacturer, thus eliminating the possibility of counterfeits entering their stock.

One common practice of these distributors is that they keep returns separated from known good stock to avoid the possibility that returns have been switched for authentic parts.

Members of ECIA (Electronic Component Industry Association) are screened to be authorized distributors, but please note that for a distributor to be considered an “authorized distributor” by the ECIA, they only have to have more than 50% of their revenues coming from the sale of components from their authorized lines, so it’s possible for an “authorized distributor” to sell non-authorized product, as long as it’s not from a manufacturer on their authorized linecard. Please make sure that the distributors you buy from are actually authorized by the manufacturer for the components you buy.

Here at TodayComponents.com, we're an authorized distributor from many of the manufacturer we carry, so rest assure that the parts you get from us are authentic!

Collaboration tools in the hardware design space are building steams. At the first glance, hardware development collaboration tools has similar features as software development collaboration tools like asset management and version control, however, its proprietary formats and complicated data structures makes building these tools a lot more difficult.

The good news is: as they gain wider adoption, they keep getting better and we are starting to see a lot of efficiency gains in the hardware development process. Teams collaborate more effectively, less time wasted on repeating mundane tasks like footprint drawing and simulation model building.